Super 8

Synopsis

Star Trek director JJ Abrams returns to the sci-fi fray with this paranormally exciting adventure with loud echoes of his hit sci-fi production Cloverfield. In 1979, a bunch of young, aspiring film-makers find themselves at the scene of a train crash, the consequences of which wreak havoc on their little Ohio town. Seems the train was carrying highly classified cargo from Area 51, the military base specialising in UFO activity. But it's hard to see the contents staying classified for long... Steven Spielberg boards Abrams' all-action express as producer.

Director

JJ Abrams

Cast

Joel Courtney

Elle Fanning

Kyle Chandler

Riley Griffiths

Ron Eldard

Review

Focusing on the family traumas and detective prowess of some pint-sized amateur movie-makers in a fictional 1970s Ohio, JJ Abrams and Spielberg's labour of love is a trip down memory lane that has had movie geeks salivating over its mysterious and complex viral campaign - complete with "recovered" reels of old film" - for over a year now.

And by God, the wait is worth it. A flawed but palpably heartfelt and masterfully rendered hybrid of action film and human drama, Super 8 takes you back to a more innocent age of film-making, when guts and gore were either laughable or nonexistent and children painted model trains instead of thinking up clever quips and swearing.

Abram's distinctly Spielbergian opus is set in the made-up town of Lillian, where bossy Charles and his best bud Joe (newcomers Riley Griffiths and Joel Courtney) are making a zombie film with their gang of suburban misfits.

Joe lost his mother in a factory accident not long ago and the film, made on a simple Super 8 camera, is his only escape, while his sheriff dad wallows in grief.

The kids somehow convince the pretty Alice (a very talented Elle Fanning, sister of Dakota) to join them and drive them to the train station late at night so they can film with added "production value" at the insistence of Orson Welles-wannabe Charles.

During some delightfully precocious filming where the boys are transfixed by the lovely Alice, a car drives onto the railway tracks and a passing freight train crashes into it.

Here Abrams is deep in his element; carriages are blasted into the air and all manner of things explode in a scene that is at once thrillingly visceral and yet filled with childlike wonderment.

As mysterious disappearances and military lockdowns follow, the children carry on filming against a backdrop of mounting fear, unaware that Charles's camera, knocked over in the getaway, has captured footage of the train's fearsome cargo.

Abrams is a master of suspense, drip-feeding us added layers to the mystery. What are the white cubes, where have the car engines gone, why do Joe and Elle's parents hate each other... And all the while without revealing the exact nature of the threat itself.

The genius is that this is not, for the most part, a sci-fi thriller. Yes, there is a scary something always lurking around the corner, but the story is about how relationships develop between the children, and with their even more traumatised parents.

Though the characters are pretty thinly drawn - sad kid, bossy kid, crazy kid, and so on - they are sweet and sassy enough to get away with it, while the parallel between Joe's curiosity over the camera and that of Abrams himself, who has known Spielberg since childhood, is clear.

A surefire hit, Super 8 is a tender homage to a bygone era of film-making with just the kind of modern monster action you'd expect from Abrams.